Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

  Lieutenant Michael Nagle had fought in Spain from the age of sixteen, and had suffered a number of wounds in the next three years. He was still barely older than twenty, and his wife was the daughter of a clergyman, though of a lively character, and thus, it was thought, not only a threat to Mrs Younghusband’s preeminence but a culpable ten years younger than her. She had now been accused by Mrs Younghusband of trying to advance her husband by flirtations with senior officers – and worse, of course. Mick Nagle had challenged Captain Bobby Younghusband to a trial of honour, an exchange of pistol shots. This being a delicate thing to arrange, it nonetheless hung over poor Captain Younghusband like a raised sword, for he would be fighting for his wife’s right to be waspish, whereas Mr Nagle would be fighting for a larger thing, his wife’s entire honour.

  In the self-importance of my shame I had imagined that all conversation would end when I walked in, that Madame Bertrand’s discourse would have been utterly on me, as if I were the only woman who had discovered she had been weighed and balanced in that particular way by the Emperor and his suite.

  ‘Hello, Betsy,’ she told me in her English, an English that had travelled far and from which the brogue that one heard from the mouths of some of the sentries of the 53rd had been squeezed by the pressure of events, by the speaking of French, by the attendance at an Imperial court, by the weight of politics and war. ‘You have not been so well, my dear girl …?’

  Severe anguish is often cured or at least lessened by accidental things, and so Fanny’s casualness, nothing to remark on in absolute terms, seemed to reduce my shock and dismay to the size of a mundane burden. For Fanny was still what she had been, somewhere between an earthy younger aunt and elder sister. Since she had not been changed, perhaps I had not been altered as much as I presumed I had. For I saw at once that to have one’s merits and demerits as a woman weighed at the Emperor’s table and to have the garbled details passed onto me by a strange, malicious boy was not such a large thing in her universe, and perhaps should not be in mine. These women were used to this sort of commentary. My mother had survived comparison with Josephine. This was not considered a crime, a reason for forswearing the world, by Fanny Bertrand, and probably not even by my mother.

  Once again, I was back to being Betsy. Whatever that was.

  NAME AND NATURE

  Built to return things in kind …

  On a day in April 1816, English and native yamstocks, slaves and freed slaves squinted at a newcomer, Sir Hudson Lowe, who landed from the Phaeton with his handsome wife and stepdaughters, and Sir Hudson, built to return things in kind, squinted back.

  He was a new kind of governor. The Crown now considered the island so significant that it had taken it from the East India Company. In a way that had never occurred in its history, Sir Hudson landed with vice-regal power, not simply the power of the Company. The Tory Cabinet of Great Britain had endowed him with a profounder authority than anything dear Colonel Wilks had dreamed of. So he landed, and he poisoned the earth with his tread.

  It was later that I reflected that the gumwood, giving out its sugary juice that attracted no one except the large blue-bodied flies, which sucked its sap and then flew on to plague us all, thus replicated in botany the sort of man Sir Hudson would let himself become, with a crooked purpose and a fraudulent sweetness of manner likely to attract the wrong creatures.

  Jane and I were heedlessly working on our French translation when, the morning of the day following Lowe’s arrival, the merely rumoured Sir Hudson was installed as governor at Plantation House, attended by our father and other merchants and worthies. Letters Patent were read by a plump young aide named Sir Thomas Reade, his inquisitor and chief of police, and so was the governor’s commission, which dealt above all with keeping the Ogre secure.

  During Sir Thomas’s reading, the island became a property the Tory Cabinet in England would hold close to its heart, no longer a rock at arm’s length from the Crown, but an intimate possession of the British Sovereign. It must be so to keep the Demon in place.

  Father reported Sir Hudson to be a man of reddish hair and pale, sun-bleached eyelashes with a permanent band of dark skin on one cheek. He might prove a pleasant fellow, you couldn’t tell, but he did not at first impression pass my father’s easy tests in that regard. His wife was very pretty and barely older than my mother.

  A brief message – more an edict, said O’Meara – was sent to Longwood that the new governor would visit Napoleon at nine o’clock the following morning. There was a rare torrent of rain that morning and an Atlantic gale was blowing around the Barn, scouring Deadwood Camp and Longwood, but Sir Hudson put on his mess uniform and orders and cape and set out with his adjutant Major Gorrequer (again, not a bad fellow by nature, very British despite his French Huguenot name, as my lenient father said) and Sir Thomas Reade. Dear old Admiral Cockburn, who was rumoured to have become smitten by Albine de Montholon, now close to childbirth, also rode out to Longwood, together with a range of smart officers, under humid great pud dings of cloud. The governor and the others dismounted and, with the admiral advising a cautious and polite approach, Gorrequer knocked on the front door. Our stately young friend Novarrez met them. General Bertrand had been waiting with Novarrez and came forward to greet Gorrequer. He had also dressed to the height of his station, in the splendid blue uniform of a French general with golden facings that were his answer to the red- and navy-coated gentlemen waiting for entry in the downpour.

  Bertrand was a man in whose soul truculence was not the usual sentiment. To him, it did not seem wise to make enemies of the jailors. But the message Bertrand’s master, who must have waited in his bedroom, full of glee and contempt, and unable to sit, had told the marshal to give the visitors was not a conciliatory one. He had been instructed to say that this was an hour at which the Emperor did not receive any person. And apart from that, the Emperor (as Bertrand insisted on calling him) was indisposed – which happened to be, at least to an extent, the truth.

  Gorrequer brought the message to Sir Hudson.

  ‘When he’s like this,’ grumbled the admiral, ‘you can’t force yourself on him.’

  ‘But you can besiege him,’ Sir Hudson suggested.

  ‘You’ll need endless resources of stubbornness for that,’ the admiral told him.

  Lowe insisted on dismounting and pacing up and down before the windows of the drawing room for a few minutes, and then requested to see Bertrand to make an appointment with his prisoner on the following day. Poor Bertrand must have known that whatever hour was chosen the Emperor would accept it with rage. Two o’clock was fixed upon for the interview.

  Sir Hudson went back to his steaming, streaming horse and the party rode away under the low clouds. It had been a triumph for the Ogre. Hadn’t it? At that time no one understood, except Sir Hudson himself, the frenzy in his soul to hold onto his prize Corsican. Yet that day he had been unable to find out, by direct observation, whether the Emperor was retained or not.

  At two o’clock the next day – a bright one, the gale having abated – we saw from our verandah the entire gubernatorial force set out again across Deadwood Plain. Sir Hudson had prepared for the meeting precisely, and so had Talma’s theatrical disciple, the Ogre. What do I know of what happened? Well, the instant gossip, from the lightning fork of O’Meara’s tongue, and many other of the island’s speedy lips, including those of soldiers in the governor’s group, gave us some concept.

  The party was at first ushered into the waiting room, behind which was the billiard saloon where they were to be received. Cockburn suggested to Sir Hudson Lowe that he, the admiral, who had something of the Ogre’s confidence, would introduce Sir Hudson. Lowe agreed, and they waited for the Ogre to emerge.

  At the door to the salon, Novarrez appeared again. As soon as he heard himself announced Sir Hudson stood up and rushed forward, entering the salon before the admiral could accompany him. Novarrez closed the door to the admiral and told him calmly the Emperor had not called him
.

  The admiral raged out to his horse and rode away. He would be departing soon, leaving his flirtation with Albine and querulous Exile himself.

  Sir Thomas Reade sent a letter to my father saying that Sir Hudson wanted to talk to him. It was the fourth day since the landing of that potent man.

  After my father got home from that meeting, he sought straightaway the solitary comfort of brandy. I heard him muttering to my mother. ‘There’s something disordered … incomplete in the man,’ and ‘the man’ of whom he spoke could only be Sir Hudson.

  To us my father’s job was the musty business of supplying kegs and bags and panniers and boxes of comestibles. It was a trade that, as encountered at the warehouse, had an unappealing if not unpleasant odour of hessian, even when it was spiced by a supply of cloves or cinnamon or mixed with the treacly aroma of brandy-soaked kegs. And it seemed the least likely of occupations to furnish a quarrel between Sir Hudson and my father.

  On the fifth day after the arrival, my father was again summoned to be quizzed over the items supplied to Longwood, from wine to soap to pork. Sir Hudson claimed to have orders to cut down on the expenses of the population of Longwood. But these budgetary arguments were not all that worried my father; it was that the man was very pleased to be as punitive as he could with the expenses of Our Friend’s menage.

  During these meetings Major Gorrequer made notes of what was said by both Sir Hudson and my father, and my father found this offensive, as if he were being advised to weigh, measure and trim his words. It also implied that, later on, if he were to utter something to contradict what he had already said, his mistake would be revealed to him by quoting from the record of these interviews. Gorrequer was not going to side with him, my father said, as pleasant a fellow as he might seem. He would not lend comfort to anyone except Sir Hudson.

  On the sixth day, when my father had been grilled about all items available for the French household, he was told that the £12,000 per annum previously allocated to Longwood must be cut down to £8000.

  Did Sir Hudson not know, asked my father, that nearly all human amenities had to be shipped long and expensive distances, either from Britain or the continent or from Africa? My father reminded the governor that he, William Balcombe, was bound by his contract with the East India Company to include these costs in the price of goods he purveyed on the island. If the two thousand men of the garrison, no less than the presence of the flagship and its flotilla, had driven prices up, it was no fault of his, and it necessitated him to employ new clerks and warehousemen.

  But the edict was ineluctable. Sir Hudson was calm and close-lipped in declaring that the cut was decreed by forces that transcended the island, transcended any one nation, transcended the cherubim and seraphim.

  It could only be done, my father knew, by grossly cheapening the quality of what he supplied to Longwood. For the fifty-five persons of Napoleon’s suite, said Sir Hudson, twenty pounds in total a day, the new level of expenditure to be followed, could be considered an indulgence. Much could be cut, he said blithely. For example, the household should receive from now only half-a-dozen fowls a day – the very Longwood servants had been eating fowl, Sir Hudson claimed. Butter should be five pounds only. Salad oil – surely no more than three pints. Coffee, two pounds of it, but restricted to the suite and O’Meara. Thirty eggs a day were permitted. Given the French appetite for eggs, this was not a generous amount. Eight pounds of candles was, after weighty conferences with my father, settled on as the weekly maximum and would at first blush also seem generous. Yet the Emperor possessed candelabra and liked a well-lit house. Vinegar was a mere quart, flour just five pounds and fruit restricted to ten shillings a day, even though all the time produce rose in cost, as my father yet again warned Sir Hudson, now that a new regiment and three European commissioners had arrived on the island. Sir Hudson told my father, ‘The Emperor had better become an orchardist and a gardener if those French want more.’ Sir Hudson declared that the farmers, such as Polly Mason, should be encouraged to temper their prices, and if they didn’t he would seek the power from Cabinet to curb them.

  It was the delicate paring that offended my father, the brain for small measurements that His Excellency Sir Hudson Lowe had brought to the exercise – the niggardly glee, for example, with which he decided that two hams a fortnight should be all that were offered the house and that these should not exceed fourteen pounds each. Fish for the same period should not be more than four pounds. Sir Hudson’s sword similarly fell on salt, mustard, pepper, capers and preserves, all combined not to exceed seven pounds. My father had no idea how Sir Hudson decided it was specifically seven pounds that provided a rational limit of these enhancers of the French table.

  Champagne was to be considerably rationed but Cape wine could be supplied in its stead.

  ‘After all,’ Sir Hudson told my father, his eyes askew and rancorous, his mouth pitched somewhere between a grimace and a smile, ‘prisoners cannot afford to be fussy.’

  My father came home quite clearly harried by questions to do with provisions. ‘Sank Bootay’ Alexander or William might yell as they saw him open early his first bottle of evening port. This most amenable soul was now utterly alienated from Plantation House. It had taken Sir Hudson such a short time to achieve.

  Personages who would once have seemed astounding on our island also landed from the same squadron that had delivered Sir Hudson and had brought three other unpredictable and grandly entitled presences – commissioners from the Great Powers, from Russia, Austria and France. Given all the inroads made upon us by Sir Hudson, and his growing contest with the terms of the Ogre’s detention, we barely had attention to give them, but we did have time to weigh them and decide there was nothing special about them.

  To keep an eye on the management of the Emperor on the island and to report on how he was guarded, the Russian Tsar had sent a small man, wiry, though, and of quick movement. His name was Count Alexander Antonovich Balmain. He was perhaps my father’s age, still on the lower side of forty years, and he walked like a calm and measured man. Though he was Russian his ancestors had been Scottish, as he liked to tell people and would emphasise to us at dinner, and this accounted for his un-Russian name.

  The man sent by the restored King of France was much older, nearly sixty and corpulent and named the Marquis de Montchenu. Apparently, on his arrival on the warship Oronte, he had begun telling Major Hodson in the main street that he must see the Emperor urgently. ‘I have known this person, Bonaparte,’ he shouted. To show he believed in the wonderful and sanctified old days before the Revolution, he wore a long queue, about the length of the tail of an average-sized dog, and seemed thus to come from an earlier time. ‘I commanded his regiment when he was a child! He knows me and my king requires me to interview and assess him. Please ensure this is possible this very day! Where are you all? Where is the governor?’

  Even as de Montchenu raged, a rider was on his way to Longwood, and came back reporting that the Emperor would not receive de Montchenu or any commissioner appointed by kings or emperors – those he had once addressed as equals and by name, had liked and exchanged pleasantries with, or, in the case of the restored Bourbon King of France, despised as a charmless inheritor of a poisonous bloodline.

  The third of the triumvirate Sir Hudson had to greet was the Austrian Baron von Stürmer. He was an ancestral nobleman with a beautiful young French wife, of no more rank than the Balcombes, who liked to tell people that Las Cases had tutored her brother while they had all been in London hiding from the Terror in France.

  I managed to grasp the idea that these three new officials were largely immune from Sir Hudson’s edicts, though their servants were not. Sir Hudson had the power to insist that when the commissioners were with the Emperor, he would be present too. Immediately the three men met somewhere in Jamestown, considered Sir Hudson’s decree an intrusion, and swore they would not try to visit the Emperor until Sir Hudson relented on that matter. So they settled into the
life of the island. Once they would have seemed gods, the most exotic novelties. But now that we had the ultimate standard of mankind resident amongst us, and he refused to see them, they became, at least for now, no more than other householders.

  O’Meara had to make a medical report on the Emperor to Plantation House at least every two days, and he told us of an extraordinary incident he had heard about from Sir Hudson’s clerk, a man named Janisch. Sir Hudson, a few nights past, had woken from a nightmare that the Emperor had vanished from the island. ‘He is always having nightmares, this commander of bandits and thieves,’ O’Meara asserted. ‘So he rouses his policeman, Sir Tom, and they gallop across the plain and come to Longwood and hammer on the door. They are met by Novarrez, who sleeps in the corridor. The governor’s eyes were darting and wanted to be assured OGF was in place, so I woke Captain Poppleton, who rushed from our fresh-finished quarters at the rear of the house and assured the governor that he had seen the Emperor.’

  In the meantime Reade had ranted round the house, opening doors and calling, ‘Come out, Bonaparte. We want Napoleon Bonaparte!’

  The next day OGF murmured to O’Meara, as O’Meara palpated the Emperor’s side to find the cause of pain there, that if he had known that his voice would give Sir Hudson any comfort, he would have kept quieter, but he had cried out to let the governor know he was in residence.

  On the strength of this story, Jane and I rode across with my father to commiserate with OGF and de Montholon, now firmly in charge of the household, to Gourgaud’s occasional chagrin, over the governor’s night visit and Sir Thomas Reade’s crass banging about the house.